Exclusive: Media critic Howard Kurtz has lost his job as Washington bureau chief for Newsweek/Daily Beast after a blog post in which he falsely accused basketball player Jason Collins of hiding his past engagement to a woman while coming out as gay. But Kurtz’s journalistic abuses have a much longer history, writes Robert Parry.
Exclusive: Ex-Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who normally ducks questions about overturning Al Gore’s election in 2000 and putting George W. Bush in the White House, admits that “maybe” a mistake was made. But she still won’t accept the magnitude of her judicial crime, says Robert Parry.
Exclusive: At the heart of the new George W. Bush Presidential Library – and the Bush Family’s frantic efforts to rehabilitate its image – is a novel approach toward putting visitors on the spot by putting them in Bush’s shoes as he faced tough choices, a challenge that Robert Parry agrees to take on.
The U.S. news media typically applies hackneyed or partisan templates to political issues, often distorting rather than informing the public debate. In a recent interview, President Obama mildly challenged some of that media behavior, reports Danny Schechter.
Exclusive: Current TV’s core failure was the choice by its founder Al Gore to avoid political conflict in 2005 when President George W. Bush was near the height of his powers. That act of cowardice made the “progressive” network largely irrelevant to the biggest battles of the last decade, says Robert Parry.
Exclusive: President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney are locked in a tight race with Tuesday’s election likely to be decided in a few hard-fought battleground states, much like 2000. And, Robert Parry sees other troubling parallels to that disastrous election.
Exclusive: The U.S. news media continues to hail Rep. Paul Ryan as a “fiscal hawk” despite the ocean of red ink in his budget plan. The latest to misrepresent Ryan’s record is the New York Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye, who famously distorted Al Gore’s words in Campaign 2000, writes Robert Parry.
Exclusive: As President Obama faces a tough reelection fight, some on the Left vow to sit it out or vote for a third party, saying support for Obama would dirty them. But there is another moral imperative, to mitigate the harm a U.S. president can inflict on the world’s people and the planet itself, says Robert Parry.
Exclusive: Both the mainstream U.S. press and some on the Left underestimate the danger to the Republic from having a Republican majority on the Supreme Court rendering decisions based on partisan needs not constitutional principles, a threat that surfaced in December 2000 and continues today, writes Robert Parry.
From Editor Robert Parry: In the 16-plus years of Consortiumnews, our most difficult fund-raising periods have been in presidential election years like this one. Many supporters tell me they are funneling what money they have into campaigns and, implicitly, that independent journalism is not a priority.
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